


Equal to the Challenge

by Trobadora



Series: Mord'Sith Cycle [5]
Category: Legend of the Seeker
Genre: F/M, agiel play
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-02-17
Updated: 2014-02-17
Packaged: 2018-01-12 20:27:55
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 886
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1198902
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Trobadora/pseuds/Trobadora
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Pain is a gift, and he gives it to her. (Set prior to <i>Reckoning</i>.)</p>
            </blockquote>





	Equal to the Challenge

**Author's Note:**

  * For [brontefanatic](https://archiveofourown.org/users/brontefanatic/gifts).



> Originally started for brontefanatic's [D'Hara Fest](http://peoplespalace.livejournal.com/586333.html) prompt, "Darken/Cara, Pain is a form of love." Finished for [Porn Battle XV](http://oxoniensis.dreamwidth.org/65746.html) and the prompts: "Cara Mason/Darken Rahl, gift, exchange, thrum."

Cara kneels, but her eyes are challenge. The set of her shoulders, the curl of her lip, the lift of her chin: she is all confidence and self-assurance. She knows her strength, and offers it to him with pride.

Darken Rahl takes the challenge.

He has known Mord'Sith who yielded to him, taking everything he gave. Who prided themselves in never flinching, offered up their endurance in the face of pleasure as much as pain, who embraced suffering as proof of their stamina only. Cara is not one of them. She meets his lips with her own, challenges his tongue when it seeks entrance to her mouth, grinds against him, flush with a thrill that is, just like Cara herself, all challenge.

Cara has endurance aplenty; she's never failed any test. But she more than embraces: she rushes toward, a joyful delight in her eyes, in her teeth-bared smile, in the flourish of her hand offering him her agiel. 

To her as to him, the agiel is a familiar ache, a comfortable thrill. But Cara is Mord'Sith - in the taking and in the giving, pain is her art and her trade. No woman and no man, not even a Rahl, can best her in this. 

In all his jealous pride, Darken has never begrudged his Mord'Sith their claim, their mastery, their monopoly on pain. He wouldn't want them to be less than they are. Yet it burns, this knowledge, this certainty - burns more with Cara, somehow: He can paint red-black veins on Cara's skin, but they fade as soon as they appear. He can leave welts, can leave bruises and cuts, but those, too, will heal. He might break bone, might give Cara scars, but that's a crude way to leave a mark, only for those who can think of no other. He knows better, in the end.

He might break her bones and scar her skin and still not truly leave a mark.

It clenches something inside him, behind his breastbone, buried deep. It brings something welling up behind his eyes, an unfamiliar, uncomfortable pressure. It tempts his thoughts onto trails he's never quite let himself wander. He has no idea what to do with any of it.

Still, when Cara holds out her agiel he rises to the challenge. 

He is Lord Rahl. He commands the Sisters of the Agiel; they wield their weapons at his command. They are his; _she_ is his. And still he wants to prove it to Cara: as much as she can take whatever he gives, so can he. He's equal to any challenge she could make.

He reaches out and closes his hand around Cara's, not taking the agiel from her grasp but holding it with her, feeling its power through both their flesh, thrumming against their bones. Cara's eyes light up, and when she moves her hand, he lets her guide the agiel's movement: across her lips and her nipples, and then, with a wicked gleam in the blue of her eyes, against his chest.

Darken's hand is around hers, and he could stop the movement easily. He won't. When the agiel brushes against his skin, whining its high-pitched song, painting pain and pleasure into his chest, raising gooseflesh and driving up his body's sensitivity more with every brief brush, he closes his eyes, letting himself feel. His lips part, and he moans, unashamed.

Then Darken lets his hand fall away from Cara's, leaving the agiel in her hand.

He knows how to wield or suffer an agiel as well as any Mord'Sith, but he's not one of them. However much he can take, however much he lets Cara give to him, it's never an equal match. Something in him craves her challenge, but she's always already his. 

Cara challenges him because he allows it; because he thrills to it and rises to it in delight. There is nothing either of them could change about that, even if they would. They wouldn't. 

They wouldn't, but he feels it, deep in his chest, something hot and tight and clenched that wants more, wants something real, wants something he can never have and never give.

So this is the gift he gives to Cara, the only one he can give: the agiel in her hand, playing on his skin, slipping into his mouth, pressing against his cock. His back arched, his mouth open in a voiceless scream, skin flushed and beaded with sweat. Cara's agiel caught between them, pulsing through both of them as they kiss, heedless and hungry and urgent. Black veins snaking over his chest, or his back, or the insides of his thighs. Her agiel inside him, the most intimate punishment and reward, the kind he wouldn't give to just any Mord'Sith.

He can't best Cara in a Mord'Sith's game, but he can meet her, challenge for challenge, pain for pain. He can take whatever she can give. Pain is a gift, and he gives it to her, skin to skin, pain to pain.

His; hers. They give it to each other. It passes between them. It cradles them. The high-pitched whine of the agiel is a steady thrum in the air, the song and magic of their coupling.

His; hers; theirs.

She is Mord'Sith. He is Lord Rahl. It's all he knows how to give.


End file.
